If they called him out here because of vampires, he was going to kill Nick Tanaka. At the very least, he was going to give the guy an earful to end all earfuls.
Still frowning, he thought about the person he’d felt behind all this. In his tour of the cop’s mind, Black got an energetic hit off the “medicine man” who’d called him out here, the one who called himself an old friend of Black’s while he’d been on the phone with Nick.
Black hadn’t seen the guy’s face really, but he’d distinctly felt his presence, his light.
As a seer, he trusted those impressions more.
It wasn’t Joseph he was going to meet, the seventy-something chief from that prison in Louisiana. He hadn’t seen or felt any sign of the other chiefs from the prison, either.
No, this particular ghost came from a different chapter in Black’s life.
Clicking his tongue under his breath, almost without knowing he did it, he shook his head.
“Fucking Manny,” he muttered. “Jesus.”
The cop turned, sharper that time, staring at him. “You really are a reader.”
Black grunted. “You tell me, Fox Mulder.”
The cop barely seemed to hear him.
“…Manny said you were one, but I was beginning to have my doubts with all the stupid questions you were asking. And pretty much every time you’ve opened your mouth, really.”
Black shrugged, not bothering to answer.
He already knew this guy knew what he was, so there was no point being coy.
Well, he didn’t know what he was exactly.
Just like Black thought, Manny told this ghost-hunter-slash-UFO-chasing cop that Black was “psychic.” He also implied Black had other, non-specified supernatural abilities.
The cop didn’t know anything truly relevant about him. Manny said he was psychic, not from an alien race, so the cop just assumed Black was like any other psychic asshole you might find hanging over a tarot deck in a coffee shop in Sedona or Santa Fe.
Still, Black didn’t feel particularly inclined to cooperate with the guy, given how little he’d shared with him.
“I’m not even going to ask what the fuck that means,” Black said. “…about the ghost and boogey-man hunting. And Nick told me, genius. About Manny. I wasn’t ‘guessing.’ Only idiots believe in that New Age bullshit.”
The man frowned for real, turning his head to squint at him from the back of the bay horse.
After another pause, he grunted, giving a sideways eye-roll.
“Bullshit,” he said. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“Whatever,” Black said, shrugging at the guy’s back when he looked away. “Why not just cut the shit and you tell me what you want? Pretend you’re a cop, like you actually know how to do your job.” Grunting, he added, “In the process, why not tell me what kind of fucking cop you are, dragging me out into the middle of the desert to hunt…”
Trailing, Black bit his lip, forcing himself silent.
It had just crossed his mind that, on paper anyway, he was as crazy as this jackass.
He’d spent the last year of his life hunting vampires with a secret government military unit devoted to non-human national security threats and international terrorism.
The man turned, giving him a harder smile.
“I thought you said you weren’t a reader?”
Black shook his head, once. “I never said that. I said only gullible idiots believe in New Age bullshit. Like ghosts. And werewolves. And UFOs.” Black grunted, gripping the horse’s reins more tightly in his hand, holding the saddle’s pommel in the other. “I suppose you also think lizard people control the government. And chem-trails are fucking with your mitochondria. And weather machines in Antarctica are causing global warming. And mind control drugs in the water supply are making you watch reality television.”
If his words bothered the other man, it didn’t show.
“Then you admit it?” he said. “You’re a reader?”
“Again… I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Tonto.”
That time, the man chuckled for real.
“Bullshit,” he said, but that time, he sounded genuinely amused. “Jesus. Nick really wasn’t kidding about you.”
Black didn’t say anything for a while after that.
They rode in silence as the sun slid lower on the horizon.
Black found his eyes following the shadows as the horses picked their way across land that was flatter and redder than anything he’d ever seen.
He’d been to New Mexico before, but mostly to visit a friend of his who lived in the southeastern part of the state. It was hot and dry as hell down there too, but the land was mostly baked yellow, not red like this.
Where he was now reminded him of old Westerns, or cartoon deserts.
Protrusions of red rock jutted out in that expanse. He saw mountains in the distance, but the flat, arid earth seemed to stretch for as far as his eyes could see in almost every direction.
He had to admit though, the sunset was pretty spectacular behind those cliffs.
Once the sun went down, it immediately began to cool.
Stars began appearing in the sky on the eastern horizon as they rode northwest, deeper into the reservation. Not long after, Black saw the first lights on the ground appearing up ahead.
The lights were few, but it was obviously some kind of settlement, not a fire pit with a dead animal on it, like he’d halfway feared.
He didn’t bother to talk to the joker in the hat anymore.
He figured he’d just wait and talk to Manny, now that he knew who’d really summoned him here. There had to be some story behind this––other than the shit-house crazy one he’d gotten out of the cop’s head.
Fucking New Mexico. The crazies always seemed to congregate here.
He should go to Roswell while he was here, get Miriam an alien artifact.
His amusement faded as the thought sank in, even as he fought a flicker of pain in his lower belly, strong enough to tighten his throat.
Gaos. His wife wouldn’t even speak to him.
Angel was right. He had to fix this. Somehow.
He was still frowning, turning over the thought, when the horse he was riding suddenly broke out into a fast trot. Clutching the pommel of the saddle in alarm, he gripped the horse with his legs, fighting to regain control over the leather reins. As he bobbed past the guy in the black hat, Black glanced over long enough to see the other man grin at him.
“Really fucking funny,” Black called, his voice vibrated by the hard trot.
The guy shrugged, calling after him. “I didn’t do it. She knows she’s almost home. That one likes her food.”
Black lifted his middle finger at the guy without turning his head.
The man in the hat clucked at his own horse, kicking his heels into the reddish-brown flanks to move him smoothly into a canter, then another trot. In seconds he was pacing Black’s gray and white speckled horse while the appaloosa continued to bounce him––painfully, Black noted sourly––the rest of the way to the edge of the settlement.
The horse took him straight to a dusty paddock attached to a small barn.
Despite the pitch darkness, a young girl emerged out of the barn doors to grab hold of his horse’s bridle, moving so quickly and silently he didn’t see her until his horse had already come to an abrupt stop, nearly unseating him again.
She couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
When Black dismounted, grateful to be standing on solid ground once more, she stared up at his height as if she thought he was some kind of monster.
The man with him in the black hat said something to her, not in English.
The girl nodded, giving Black another wide-eyed stare.
It occurred to him that he’d taken his sunglasses off when it started getting dark. Maybe her night vision was good enough that his eyes weirded her out?
His wife had strangely made him more self-conscious about his gold irises, no
t less. Most people just went with the “genetic anomaly” thing, but Miri told him it wasn’t as convincing of a story as he seemed to think. She’d made him realize he’d gotten a bit cavalier about hiding his race in general, not just in relation to his eyes.
As he thought it, he put the dark glasses back on.
He could see perfectly well in the dark, anyway––another perk of being a seer with military training. And yeah, wearing sunglasses at night might be viewed as odd, but he’d been disarming people by playing the eccentric for years.
This trip was starting to make him nervous, truthfully.
Manny knew what Black was.
He was one of the few humans who did, being in the specially-created 13th Regiment with Black back in his green beret days. Had Manny fucking told these people? If so, why? It couldn’t be for the cockamamie story he’d pulled out of this cop’s mind.
Why the fuck would Manny put him in this position?
Whatever the reason, this was feeling a lot less like a vacation from his current problems with his wife, and a lot more like a continuation of the problems he thought he’d left behind in New York.
“Who’s the girl?” he said, after she led the horses away.
The man gave him a harder look. “My daughter.”
Black held up his hands, frowning. “Jesus. Paranoid much? I’m married, asshole. And I’m not into toddlers.”
The guy shook his head a little, walking away.
He didn’t say anything directly to Black’s words, but again, the interaction both annoyed Black and made him increasingly uneasy. Had Manny really told these people what he was? It would explain the guy’s paranoia to some extent.
At this point, Black was feeling pretty paranoid himself. He also wondered if it had been such a great idea to come out here alone.
He’d done it because he trusted Nick.
Of course, he’d also trusted Manny once, but a lot of time had passed since then.
“Come on,” the man said, motioning him forward. He gave Black a second scowl. “You asked about my daughter, and you’ve never once asked me my name, you know that?”
“You mean it’s not Tonto?” Black joked.
When the silence deepened, he scowled in the dark, forcing himself to dial back his aggression a bit. “Fine. What’s your name?”
“Jasper. My friends call me Red, though.”
“So call you Jasper?”
The man gave him another of those smiles, shaking his head in defeat. “How about Detective Natani?” he said.
“How about Jazzy Jasper?” Black countered. “Or Jasper the friendly Casper chaser?”
Detective Natani kept walking, exhaling in a tired-sounding sigh.
“You really are an asshole,” he said, without looking back.
Black smiled a little more that time, unable to help himself.
He was using his sight for real now, though. He scanned every mind he found in the vicinity as they approached the town. Once they were walking between buildings, his radar jacked up to even higher alert. Most of the minds he touched were afraid.
Of what, he couldn’t tell precisely. There was a lot of superstitious mumbo-jumbo worked in with the glimpses he caught of various minds. Even so, the intensity of that fear rippled his living light, putting him unwillingly into a type of heightened, quasi-combat mode.
Whatever it was that put the fear of God in these people, it was clear they were all afraid of the same thing. As he continued to touch minds here and there, Black increasingly felt his own adrenaline spike.
He hoped to fuck this wasn’t about vampires.
He’d pretty much had it with those goddamned things.
Given that vampires were the main reason his wife wasn’t currently speaking to him, the thought made him sick to his stomach, bringing his pain back in a sharp wave he almost couldn’t think through. It wasn’t just worry, it was out and out fear. He could never explain to her he’d come out here not knowing it was a vampire thing.
She’d never believe him.
She likely wouldn’t believe him even if Nick backed him up.
Worse, she already thought he had a problem with the whole blood thing. If she got it into her head he’d come out here not to kill them, but something to do with the whole being fed on thing, he seriously doubted she’d be willing to discuss it with him at all.
Fighting back another wave of nausea, he clenched an arm around his waist.
Part of him wanted to leave––right now.
He’d promised Miri he would stop doing the vampire-hunting thing. He fucking promised her he wouldn’t go near the damned things, for any reason. He said he’d only done it until Brick was in custody, that he had no reason to do it now that he was.
Now that Uncle Sam had that piece of shit locked in an underground bunker somewhere, hopefully jabbing him with needles and trying to figure out how to make him a real boy again, Black had fully intended to walk away.
She’d looked pretty skeptical when he said it, but he’d meant it.
Truthfully, now that Brick was out of the way, he was more than happy to let Miri’s Uncle Charles and the Colonel hunt down and stomp out what remained of Brick’s bloodsucker armies, at least until they posed a direct threat to anyone in Black’s immediate orbit.
Whatever was plaguing this town, he hoped to God it wasn’t that.
He’d never hear the end of it from Miri, if it was.
Worse, she might refuse to speak to him at all, and not for weeks this time, but for months––maybe even years. After everything that happened in New York, he almost wouldn’t blame her, but just thinking about the possibility fucking terrified him.
They were mated, so she couldn’t leave him forever.
Like it or not, she couldn’t leave him forever.
That was pretty cold comfort right now though, when separation pain made it almost impossible to sleep most nights, and he was running out of ways to jerk off without pulling her directly into it––and likely pissing her off even more.
He was still turning over what he was picking up in his random scan of the townspeople’s minds, trying not to overreact until he knew more––trying to get a grip on his own paranoia and fears, primarily around Miri––when Detective Jasper “Red” Natani turned down a driveway by a sky blue mailbox and began crunching his boots down the gravel path to the house.
Black followed warily, looking ahead at the one-story house painted the same sky blue color as the mailbox, a satellite dish on its roof.
They reached the bottom of the driveway, and Black noted another rutted path leading away from the house, right next to an old piñon tree. A barn stood to the right of the path, along with a low paddock with a number of horses watching them curiously, ears pricked forward.
Next to the piñon tree, an old Indian motorcycle was parked, along with a Toyota truck coated with a few layers of red and yellow dust.
Red walked up to the front door, pounding on it with one fist.
He did it hard enough, the old door rattled on its frame.
“Manny!” he called inside. “I’ve got your friend out here!”
“Which one?” a muffled voice answered.
“The asshole,” Natani said.
He looked about to knock again when the door abruptly opened.
Black flinched when he saw the narrow, wizened face of the man standing there, lit from one side by the porch light, and from behind by whatever light was on in his house.
He forgot sometimes, how quickly humans aged.
If the man in front of him had been seer, like Black, he would have been pushing 700 years old, if not a bit older.
In human years, he was probably in the neighborhood of his early seventies.
“Jesus,” he said.
Unthinking, he took off his sunglasses.
Manny looked at him, his eyes showing the same disbelief Black must have had in his. Even so, he could see Manny in those eyes still. Dark eyes, nearly black, and sharp as g
lass, just like they had been when the other man was in his twenties.
He wasn’t wearing combat fatigues now, but jeans worn nearly white, his steel-gray hair wrapped in a leather thong braid and hanging down the back of a dark green T-shirt. He was fit though, lean and tall like before. Only his face got hollow, which stretched his cheekbones higher, made his mouth thinner, his jaw less prominent.
“You got old as fuck,” Black said.
“You didn’t,” the man replied, still looking him over.
Manny surprised him then, breaking into a wide grin.
Walking down the wooden stairs with a surprisingly light step, he chuckled with obvious pleasure, enveloping Black in a strong hug, squeezing him with wiry, muscular arms. Black hugged him back, more in surprise at first––then with genuine warmth when he found himself enveloped in the old man’s presence.
He still felt like Manny, but softer somehow. A lot softer.
Enough years away from the war and the mess over there had brought him to a different place than when Black had last encountered him.
He was touched enough that his vision clouded by the time Manny let go.
“So you told everyone I’m a raging asshole?” Black said, wiping his eyes as he followed Manny up the stairs and inside his sky blue house. “Or was that Nick? Or both of you? Either way, maybe I should start sharing war stories. You got any grandkids I can corrupt?”
Manny broke out in a laugh. “Look me in the face and tell me I’m lying. If you can do that, Black, I’ll stop saying it.” He quirked an eyebrow. “And stay away from my damned grandkids, you degenerate.”
Jasper “Red” Natani grunted.
“He asked about Kai. Out by our place. This guy some kind of pervert, Manny?”
Black gave him an actual angry look that time, but Manny chuckled.
“Pervert would be putting it mildly,” Manny said, clapping Black on the back, gripping his shoulder in a rough hand. “But he never touched kids. In fact, I seem to remember him carving a few body parts off the one guy in our unit with that particular predilection.”
Natani grunted.
Feeling the other man’s skepticism, Black turned away from him, focusing his gaze and his sole attention on Manny.
“What’s this dick’s problem?” he said.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 3
